Opinion Leadership and Social Contagion in New Product Diffusion

Authors:
Raghuram Iyengar;Christophe Van den Bulte;Thomas W. Valente
Affiliations:
The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104;The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104;Keck School of Medicine, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, California 90089
Venue:
Marketing Science
Year:
2011

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Abstract

We study how opinion leadership and social contagion within social networks affect the adoption of a new product. In contrast to earlier studies, we find evidence of contagion operating over network ties, even after controlling for marketing effort and arbitrary systemwide changes. More importantly, we also find that the amount of contagion is moderated by both the recipients' perception of their opinion leadership and the sources' volume of product usage. The other key finding is that sociometric and self-reported measures of leadership are weakly correlated and associated with different kinds of adoption-related behaviors, which suggests that they probably capture different constructs. We discuss the implications of these novel findings for diffusion theory and research and for marketing practice.